Applicant claims priority under 35 U.S.C. xc2xa7119 of Korean Application No. 1999/64507 filed Dec. 29, 1999. Applicant also claims priority under 35 U.S.C. xc2xa7365 of PCT/KR00/01451 filed Dec. 13, 2000. The international application under PCT article 21(2) was published in English.
The present invention relates to an ink-jet printer for digital textile printing, especially relates to an ink-jet printer, the transporting method of which uses a flat table (a transporting table) instead of a conventional roll. The present invention employs a flat table transporting method in which an object to be printed is placed on a flat table of specified size and thereby can be printed in various forms regardless of their appearances or thickness.
Conventional textile printing is usually carried out by a screen print or a roller print where a plate-making process is mandatory. However, it is difficult to catch-up with the trend and also it is not suitable for small quantity production of multi-products because the dyeing process is rather complicated. To meet those criteria, digital printing method in which a full-size printer prints on textile directly was developed and has been applied to textile industry domestically and abroad.
Digital printing method, which was considered as a revolution in dyeing technology, has been introduced in Korea in mid 1990s. This method makes it possible to reproduce the original design no matter how complicated its form is, and to print colors, which is difficult to express previously. Moreover, in the sample production, it is revolutionary in its production ability and effectiveness in that it takes only 10 minutes to produce samples with a digital printer whereas it normally took approximately 10 days with an existing printing machine. It also excels in design express, design change, color presentation compared to the existing printing machine. Different from previous method, digital printing has almost no limit in expressing design because one can directly print out his or her design created in computer and dye on textile. Changes of a design can also be done by a simple operation of a computer program in digital printing unlike the conventional methods. Also 16,700,000 colors can be expressed using a digital ink-jet printer whereas the conventional methods use approximately 30 colors of combination to express colors.
In economical aspect, digital printing contributes to a production cost reduction because small amount of textile is used to produce sample cloth before the studies on a market reaction. Then, it is possible to focus on highly possible items and produce it in real time leading to a decreased textile stock and eventually to a production cost reduction. In terms of manufacturing facility, a digital type ink-jet printer can be used in a regular office. After printing, steaming and washing processes can be either out-sourced or can be performed using it facilities.
As a result, digital printing meets the current market demands such as independent demands on designs or a flexible response to a market trend, thereby draws attention of people in textile related business, and an accelerated development in this area is expected.
Early printer with digital printing method could only be applied to special kind of textile that does not wrinkle inside the printer and cost $25-30 per square meter therefore could not be used to produce textile in large quantities and were used to make only sample clothes. Recently, however, printing using a printer has been increased following the development of large sized printers that can print on common textile.
Foreign manufacturers such as Mamaki and M-cad mostly make currently marketed textile printers. Textile printer xe2x80x9cTX1600xe2x80x9d from Mamaki, Japan, prints at the rate of 5 m per hour, however, is suitable for small quantity production of multi-products such as neckties and scarves. It is exported to Europe and USA, and is becoming popular in Korea. But this type of large printer is difficult to be commercialized due to its high price.
Also many world-class equipment manufacturers are focusing on developing digital ink-jet printer, as digital printing becomes the matter of interests in the textile industry. The printer manufacturers who offered the ink-jet printers by mid 1999 are Stork of Netherlands, Perfecta of Swiss, KC, DGS and Sophis of Belgium, Ichnose, Lectra, and Kanebo, etc. and among them, KC, DGS, and Sophis used printers manufactured by Mamaki and Stork by Konica.
Stork recently announced a regular full-scale production of a digital printer that can produce 17 m per hour. Currently they are manufacturing three different types of digital printer: Amethyst, Zircon, and Amber. Amethyst is suitable to produce natural fiber, silk, cotton, and rayon and prints on 1.6 m wide textile at the rate of 16 m per hour. Zircon is mainly for polyester and prints on 1.6 m wide textile at the rate of 7 m per hour. Amber can print on natural fiber but has demerits that its printing speed is 4 m per hour.
Recently a Korean company announced a development of a printer that can print on 1.8 m wide textile. However, despite the active development and improvements in efficiency, there are still many problems to be solved such as the limit of the width of the textile and color fastness of finished products.
Particularly, the ink-jet printers developed so far have been able to print on objects only at certain sizes and shapes and able to textile only with fixed width of 1.6 m, 1.7 m, and 1.8 m, etc. That is, as illustrated in FIG. 1, a paper path (101) in U form is formed spanning from a feeding unit (a) to a delivering unit (b) in a conventional ink-jet printer. An ink-jet head (102) is placed in an inking unit (c) within the paper path (101). This ink-jet head(102) moves to the direction perpendicular to the center of a paper surface by a carrier not described here, and is constructed to perform the desired inking as jetting ink drops. Feed roller (103) is installed in the paper path (101) and makes cassette paper or manually supplied paper from the paper tray (106) to be dispatched to an inking unit (c).
Conventional ink-jet printer used feed roller (103) installed inside the printer as a driving device to transport the printing object, and this roller transports the objects to be printed such as a paper or textile smoothly. Also there was a restriction in selecting the objects to be printed since it was required that the objects should have certain sizes (A4, A3, B5, textile with fixed width, etc.) so that the ink-jet head (102), the printing device, recognizes the zero point. Therefore, there has been a restriction in its application when a conventional textile ink-jet printer was used in that it cannot directly print on clothes that are cut into various forms or finished textile products or goods such as wallet, bag, shoes, and cup made of various materials.
The present invention is devised in order to overcome the limits of the conventional method. It is the object of present invention to provide an ink-jet printer that can print on objects regardless of its shapes whereas conventional ink-jet printers can only print on objects with specified shapes.
It is another object of the present invention to provide an ink-jet printer that can dye directly in a digital mode textile products such as clothes, scarf and handkerchiefs made in various shapes.
It is still another object of the present invention to provide an ink-jet printer which can print on almost all the materials around us such as wood, leather, synthetic leather, plastics, glass, stone, ceramic or metal in addition to textile.
It is another object of the present invention to provide an ink-jet printer which can print on objects made of various materials such as wallets, bags, shoes, stationary, frames, ornaments, cup, kitchen utensils or articles made of glass regardless of their thickness or shapes.
In order to achieve the above objectives, the present invention overcomes the conventional feed roller printing method and switches over to the flat table transportation method in which an object to be printed is placed on a flat table of a fixed size and then the flat table is transported. This method enables the printer to recognize the flat table as an object to be printed, thereby prints on objects with different shapes by controlling the thickness and structure of the transporting table.
The present invention provides an ink-jet printer having a transporting part to transport an object to be printed through a path and printing part to perform the desired digital printing by jetting ink drops to the transported object, characterized in that the transporting part comprises: (a) transporting table on which the object is fixed and with which the object is transported; (b) a transporting means for transporting the table to the printing part; and (c) a driving means for operating the transporting means.